My mission to understand the world, its cultures, and its people has led me to French-speaking Africa. Cameroon, to be precise. I am here for two months to help an NGO that works on improving awareness and treatment of mental health in the country.

Next to my volunteering, I want to find out how Cameroonians, and people in surrounding countries, experience the tech world.

How do they use their apps? What role does tech play in their lives? And most importantly, which Western-designed technologies hinder them from having a satisfactory UX?

I am fortunate to be able to speak French, so I don’t have to live in the typical ex-pat bubble you can find in each capital city. I live in an authentic neighbourhood, buy groceries at the market, eat street food, and hang out with the locals. And, of course… commute and go to the office.

I investigated daily online routines and frequent struggles. I spoke to my location connections. They come from a variety of backgrounds and disposable income groups. I also conducted guerilla interviews on public transport. I then reached out to a few local UX specialists and met with them. All these people were surprisingly consistent in their answers. They all suffer from and recognise a few main problems.

I verified the content of this article afterwards with 5 individuals, and they were impressed by the accuracy of the conclusions.

Let’s go over the findings.

Just be aware: Africa is a vast continent with many different cultures. Each country is unique; within most countries, different ethnical groups and tribes live together. Cameroon alone can already be considered a multicultural society.

Although many West and Central African countries have cultural differences, most of the issues I described in this article still apply to the Central and West African countries.

You might expect that mobile internet is an issue in some parts of Africa. You are right. But it’s different than you perhaps think.

Cameroon has three major phone network companies. Orange, MTN, and the government-run brand Camtel. The quality of network coverage varies throughout the country.

Some regions have very poor connections, but the coverage is really stable in the main cities, Yaoundé and Douala. Houses usually don’t have a fibre connection, so the mobile network is the only option for most people.

I use a Camtel and Orange sim card, and both networks’ speed is impressive. I have stable 4G networks and am constantly above 10 Mbps.

Most educated people live in the two big cities, so internet speed isn’t a problem for them. The biggest issue is the price of the data.

Orange offers 1 GB of data per day for 10,000 FCFA per month. This is around 15 euros (or dollars). Camtel’s prices are slightly lower, but their network coverage is less good. MTN is more expensive.

The average salary in Cameroon is a little more than 100,000 francs (150 euros) per month, and the legal minimum wage is around 37,000 francs (56 euros). Like in most countries, the standard of living is higher in the capital. In Yaoundé, a salary of around 250,000 francs is not uncommon.

you can see that the cost of internet is disproportionate to a regular local salary. Most people can barely afford mobile internet. Those who can, need to be careful with the data they spend.

Some people use flight mode for a part of the day to limit their usage. Cameroonian influencers even started a movement called Mode Avion, which encouraged everyone to enable flight mode for 2 hours of the day to express unhappiness about the prices.

My personal experience

I use the 3 Gb/day orange plan. This costs me 55 euros per month. This is much, much more than what I pay in France and unaffordable for the locals.

I attended a virtual conference and streamed the talks in HD. There was no option to change the resolution. I didn’t need HD, but the system automatically chose the highest resolution available. It burned through my daily data allowance quickly.

I need to plan my Zoom calls strategically because I can’t have more than 1 call daily.

I can send an SMS to my phone provider to request how much data I have left for that day. Everyone is doing this constantly, and so do I. Having to think about how much data you spend is a pain.

This illustrates how Western design influences the local user experience. Streaming a video on Facebook is technically not a problem. It loads fast, but people just can’t afford it. If you see how much data many apps spend by default, and what one GB costs, you can imagine how that influences adoption rates.

Cameroon has a big “informal market”. Many transactions are still done with physical money. Credit cards are not widely adopted. What’s problematic is that there’s a severe lack of coins.

It might sound surreal, but the country doesn’t have coins because Chinese people literally come here to steal them. They make jewellery from its material.

The Chinese collect coins via a network of slot machines, strategically installed at bike taxi points. Rides are paid with coins. The drivers then use these machines, hoping to earn a bit more.

You can’t make this up. The local police seized 2 million francs in coins at someone’s home. This person must have had very, very deep pockets.

So how does a coinless world work?

The smallest bill is 500 francs. I have a problem if I want to pay at the supermarket when the total amount is something like 2,275 francs.

Supermarkets have biscuits at the cash register that cost 25 francs. Th